Its not a mistake, its a horrifically misguided design decision.

They went through a reasonable design process based on data collected by the user experience program, the problem is anyone with a 3 digit IQ unchecked the box to send all their usage data to microsoft when they installed office. If you work in a company that installed it for you, the geeks with triple digit IQs disabled it for you. Who does that leave?

Stupid people mostly, along wIth a few lazy people that couldn't be bothered to uncheck the box.

They designed the interface for stupid people.

To make matters worse, Jensen Harris realized that if they gave users the option, they would instantly disable his masterpiece. Even some of the stupid people would have disabled it, so they removed that choice. No alternatives, no customizations.

But thats really just Word, which fell on the ribbon sword.

The main outlook window escaped relatively unscathed, but only because they ran out of time butchering the rest of office.

The last time I found myself in that position, I surveyed the environment, documented the gap in compliance and put together a risk assessment.

When they saw the cost of compliance vs the punitive penalties for non-compliance and factored in the risk that any disgruntled employee could report them with a phone call, I had the support of executive management. It took time for the accountants to "finance the compliance initiative", but in the end they came around.

On the other hand, I have seen it go the other way. An IT person was fired after suggesting the company come into compliance. Shortly thereafter they were "mysteriously" caught and audited, settled with the BSA for about $1 million, and agreed to a really strange monthly audit where every PC had to have a binder next to it with original media for every installed application. This was late 90's, but still an odd settlement.

I've never understood how they stayed in business this long.

Their loss leaders were over retail, they lost their shirt on DivX, and their service and selection have always been miserable.

I had always assumed the whole thing was a tax shelter or some large scale money laundering scheme.

Didn't they try this on the Yorktown in 1997 and have to tow the ship back to port?